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Not the deafening fusilade of hand-clapping nor the shouted "Bravos!" It was something deeper, subtler. Tetrazzini stepped forward. Tears streamed from her eyes. She blew impulsive kisses to the crowd. The pageant of the months went on. A coal merchant by the name of Rolph had displaced P.H. McCarthy as Mayor of San Francisco. He had installed what was termed "a business administration."
'Tetrazzini is here, they said to one another; Tetrazzini, who had been discovered and adored by the people of San Francisco when, as an unknown singer, she appeared in the old Tivoli opera house. At last she came, wrapped in a rose-colored opera coat, and was greeted with shouts of joy from a quarter of a million throats.
It was possible for her to have been married since he last saw her!... An agony of doubt and despair came upon him as he brooded over the thought of her possible marriage, and although he was aware that Tetrazzini was singing Mazzone's Sogni e Canti and Benedict's Carnevale di Venezia, the music was no more than a noise in the air to him. What should he do if Eleanor were married?
Tetrazzini, as she moves about the room, greeting her guests, as she does in Traviata or Lucia, can at the same time keep right on with her florid song, proving she can think of both arts at once. It is quite true there are not many coloratura singers of the first rank to-day.
This remarkable voice, of exquisite quality and development, is another proof that we have as beautiful voices to-day, if we will but realize the fact, as were ever known or heard of in the days of famous Italian songsters. Portraits often belie the artist, by accentuating, unduly, some individuality of face or figure, and Tetrazzini is no exception.
Luisa Tetrazzini, the most famous Italian coloratura soprano of the day, declares that she began to sing before she learned to talk. Her parents were not musical, but her elder sister, now the wife of the eminent conductor Cleofante Campanini, was a public singer of established reputation, and her success roused her young sister's ambition to become a great artist.
He resolved to pay her a visit, and as soon as the curtain was down, and Tetrazzini had tripped before it, smiling not unlike a good-natured child, he made his way upstairs, and asked the attendant to tap at a door on which was printed, "The Earl of Mansford."
And it is well this should be so. We would not have all coloratura singing of the same pattern of sameness or quality, for we find uniformity is monotonous. There is one peculiar mode of mastery for Galli-Curci, another for Tetrazzini, still another for Barrientos; each in her particular genre is unique, apart.
When Luisa Tetrazzini was going mad with a flute in our vicinity she varied the monotony of her life by sending pages of her favourite recipes to the Sunday yellow press. Unfortunately, I neglected to make a collection of this series. A passion for cooking caused the death of Naldi, a buffo singer of the early Nineteenth Century.
Last year the garden was a garden of thrushes: this year it is a garden of wrens. That is possibly an exaggeration, but this little Tetrazzini among the birds has never seemed to me to trill so dominantly and over so wide a rule. As for the thrushes, I do not know what has happened to them.
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